June 2007

June 30, 2007

GATAAH was GREAT. After we decompress, and bathe, and sleep, some thoughts about family, life, living, the country, roller coasters, pigs, cows, water parks, and chicken nuggets...but til then this picture sums up the whole trip.

June 29, 2007

June 28, 2007

There is a lot to be said about family. Mostly amazingly good. I think that it has taken me 40 years to really understand that.

As part of the GATAAH, we spent time with cousins in Iowa, some of whom I have (shamefully) not seen in 15 years. Last night Suzie spent time on the rickety porch swing of the family farm house that was built by my great-great grandfather just after he came back from the Civil War. And Suzie was just sitting on the swing next to my uncle and they were watching lightening bugs.

That's it.

Two generations and sixty years and a thousand other things separate them, but they were sitting on the same swing that I sat on, and my mom sat on, and my grandmother, and my great-aunt and so on...

And that was great. And I realized watching them watch lightening bugs that I need to make more of family.

It is curious to me that no matter where you are in this great nation of ours, there is one constant in nearly every gift store or amusement park or roadside attraction.

"Bag of Rocks."

For some reason that I cannot understand, there seems to be a deep-seated desire in the heart of vacationing children across the globe to get a "bag of rocks" when they are on a trip.

Frankly, I think the wholething is brilliant, and we need to honor the inventor of the "bag of rocks" as the entrpreneur of the century. He or she has been able to convince the American child that they need to spend $3.00 for shinier version of something they can pick uplong the side of the road.

Come to think of it, I wonder if the person who invented the "bag of rocks" was also the same person who came up with the idea of bottled water/

June 22, 2007

The Beautiful Bride had a bit of sore back before we left, but when she woke up this morning, it was officially torked....

As in "look in the Yellow Pages and find the least scary looking chiropractor with an office we could find" torked. And we found one, and she got twisted and adjusted and heated and cooled and heated and cooled and...

She felt a little better so, with her blessing, we dropped her off at the hotel and headed to Six Flags (heard lots of talk about the horrific incident at the the Six Flags in Louisville.) We shut the place down while Momma heated and cooled and heated and cooled her slightly less torked back all afternoon and evening.

Assuming the "torkation" (new medical technical word I just invented) continues to diminish, we will be off for Iowa tomorrow.

(oh and just to spice up the day...got a call from the alarm company that the fire alarm at the house was going off...and that the fire department was called out. So I am sure they are torked off at us, while we are torked off at the alarm company for what we learned was a false alarm...ahhh family vacation....)